Millionaire CEO Explains: 5 Steps to Get Sh*t Done

These are the five strategies you can steal that successful CEOs use to get more done in 12 weeks than most get done in 12 months. Welcome to the Martell Method.
I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.
My bestselling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now. Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers.
Strategy number one to get more done is set your boundaries. See, your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list of other people's priority on your time.
I like to use this concept called the Eisenhower Matrix that looks at everything through two axes, important and urgent, then use the right response to get people to move things forward. So for example, one of the boxes, not important, not urgent.
Well, then just send me an email. I don't need to stop and talk right now.
Number two is important, not urgent. Well, post it in Slack or team communication.
Third is not important and urgent. Send me a text, right? Because it's like, it's going to be there.
I'll get to it. And number four, if it's important and urgent, how about you give me a call? Make my phone ring because then I'm going to pay attention.
There's this funny story where my buddy Chad, he owns a retail store and he got mad at me for texting him at six in the morning because his phone was going off and he was still sleeping. I said, Hey dude, why don't you put your phone and do not disturb and then sleep in? He goes, well, it'd be cool to do that.
But unfortunately my security alarm from my retail store comes to my phone. So if somebody breaks in, I need to know.
And I was thinking to myself, dude, you're not the only person in the world that has this problem as a retail store. Like you can find a solution.
He's routing it improperly. I mean, if somebody's breaking into my house, I want to go to the police, not to my cell phone.
I get frustrated with this all the time. I remember one time I was on a finance meeting and the team's going through all the different aspects and I'm going, why are we having a meeting about this when this could have been an email that I could have reviewed on my own time, not spend 45 minutes in the calendar.
Why? Because somebody booked it. We didn't verify if the agenda was needed.
Think about it. Some of the stuff that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis, you need to push back, get people to use the right channel so that it doesn't eat up into your time.
And it goes way beyond just the channel. Think about like times and days.
Like if it's a weekend, don't call me unless there's like a fire. If it's the morning when I'm creating, then please send me an email.
So you also have to protect yourself. You got to share your preference for communicating with not only your boss, your clients, your friends, and then teach them how to treat you by not always responding right away.
I mean, some of it, you're doing it to yourself. So for example, if your boss has something to share with you, you can ask him to just drop it into Slack or text and not call you at 9 PM on a Friday night, and you'll get to it.
If they're good people and you want them in your life, then they should want you to be as effective as possible. So share your preferences with them about how you like to work.
In a world of 300 notifications a day and 24-7 communication, it can be scary to set some of these boundaries, but I'm telling you, this is how the most productive people get things done in their life. Share your preferences.
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Now let's get back to the episode. Which leads us directly to strategy number two, which is to lock in your calendar.
I remember in my 20s, my calendar was a mess. Honestly, I didn't want anything in my calendar.
I just wanted to go with the flow and do what I do. Then I realized that without some constraint, I wasn't getting anything done and I wasn't actually being even creative.
The reason why is that constraints create creativity. So if you actually want to solve big problems and be creative, you need to have constraints in your life.
These are the five rules of scheduling. Number one is big things first, small things last.
You want to put the big rocks, the big projects, the big initiatives early in your day, early in your week to move those things forward. And the small things will literally take care of themselves.
Number two is your schedule following your energy. So some people are night owls.
Other people are morning people. If you know yourself, then schedule your tasks, your activities, the projects that are going to be best aligned for the time that you need them throughout the day.
And again, ask other people to honor that. So when you collaborate with them, they're getting your best you.
Number three is batch similar work. I don't know about you, but if I batch all my meetings together, all my deep work together, all my content creation together, all my research together, I'm in that headspace and I get so much more done.
So batching things are going to make you more effective. Number four is be a hundred percent compliant.
If it's in your calendar, follow what it says, even if you don't feel like it. So many people wake up and it's like, I don't feel like it right now.
And then they go and they do the little rock instead of the big rock. Follow what you've designed for your life and it'll build the muscle and your feelings does not dictate how you act.
Number five is constantly adjust. Move things around and test and play with it.

Experiment.

It's never perfect.

I continuously change my calendar based on kind of new commitments, new initiatives, projects, people in my life as I get more time back, as I get overloaded. And it's an experiment that I'm always evolving and playing with.
There's this funny quote that I like to tell entrepreneurs all the time is that small business owners are entrepreneurs who don't value their time. Think about this.
If they valued their time, they would be more diligent with their calendar. If you can just follow these five rules, you'll be well on your way to getting more done.
But scheduling without focus is like planting seeds without sunlight, which leads us directly to strategy number three, which is kill your distractions. But before we move into that, we've got a goal of hitting 1 million subscribers.
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Did you know in Silicon Valley, where all the tech companies build their products, they have doctorate degree psychologists that are designing the software to distract you. I'm talking about the sound that goes off, the color of the notification jewel, how the notifications show up and where they show up on your app, on your phone.
Their whole goal is to get you back into the product. Your average person is getting 300 notifications a day.
There's no point on working on your clear priorities if you're not going to do deep work. And to do that, you have to define this strategy for how the world interfaces with you.
I like to tell people, ambitious people buy skills, lazy people buy distractions. So I call this strategy, the world interface system.
This is your API. In software, we call that the application program interface.
This is your version of it. So there's three ways to set this up.
Number one, and I know I'm going to freak people out right now, but turn off all your notifications. And I'm talking everything.
I mean, everything in my life is on mute except for my wife. So no notifications on my phone, no chimes, no bells, whistles, nothing.
Just go into the notifications and just turn them all off. Your goals are worth more than your distractions.
Stop that. Number two, set check-in times.
So now, instead of allowing the apps to just buzz and notify you and distract you, set the times you're going to check missed calls, text messages, emails, or spend an hour on social media, scrolling on Instagram. I don't care.
Make it a decision you opt into, not because the app told you to. And that's different.
Number three, and this is like the real, real behind the scenes that nobody's going to teach you, is you got to delegate your distraction. And I know it's an advanced move, but check it out.
Most CEOs have other people check their email, take their phone calls, essentially look on social media, pull all their Slack messages, and then present it to them. I remember hanging out with Richard Branson and I watched his assistant, all phone calls, everything went through her.
Her name is Helen and she collected it all and only the things she didn't know how to route that she would bring to Richard's attention. Can you imagine how much presence and focus and awareness he had in the moment because things weren't vibrating and distracting him in real time? And all that being said, the big idea that I love to share with people is that it's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it.
Don't think like, oh, I won't check my notifications and my phone goes off. Just decide to just turn them off.
It's easier to not have the food in your house than to try not to eat it. It's easier to turn off your notifications and to try to stay focused.
But it's not just the notifications from your apps that you want to turn off. It's also about trying to figure out what you need to work on.
Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell,

2LsandMartell on Instagram.

It's where I show the behind the scenes,

the real deal, real time.

I'd love to see you there.

Have an amazing day.

Which leads me directly to point four,

which is to pinpoint your priorities.

Priorities are all about sequencing.

And I love saying this, sequencing equals success.

Think about baking a cake. You have two people.
You have one person that has the recipe and the other one doesn't. They both have the same types of ingredients to bake the cake, but one person follows the process.
They have their priorities figured out and they bake a beautiful chocolate cake. And we'll put some peanut butter in that one.
And the other person just takes all of those ingredients and puts them together and then creates this big mush of chocolate fudge, right? It's not a cake. Why? Because of sequencing, because of prioritization.
And this applies to your life. When I was in San Francisco building my second tech company, I saw firsthand a guy named Travis Kalnick, the founder of Uber.
I watched him every day, wake up and do the thing that was going to make his company the most money, create the most value, and the thing that he was uniquely qualified to do. I actually wrote about this in my book, Buy Back Your Time, and I call it the drip matrix.
Every task you do sits on two axes, one of money and one of energy. Number one is low energy, low money.
These are things you want to delegate, delete, or defer out of your life. The quadrant above is low energy and high money.
These are things that over time you want to replace out of your calendar because they take your energy that other people still need to get done that you don't have to do anymore. The third quadrant is high energy and low money.
That's called investment. These are things like skills, beliefs, and habits that are going to make you more valuable.
The top right quadrant is high energy, high money, meaning that you make money doing the thing you love to do. And I call this production.
This is where you want to spend all of your time. The most successful CEOs and leaders in the world do two things.
The thing that only they can do that makes their team or their business more money. But how do you delegate those low value tasks that suck your energy? before we get back to the episode if you want to jump start your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter.
It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it at martellmethod.com.
This leads us directly to the fifth and final strategy, which is delegate low value tasks. Most people think they have to be an entrepreneur with 10 plus employees to delegate anything.
I did at 22 and man, was I wrong. I literally used to do everything.
I have team members, they do the work and I got to do everything else. I got to take out the garbage.
I got to make sure they're fed. All the mail's got to be processed.
And I remember one time I was thinking to myself as a CEO of a company that does employees like, why am I spending every Saturday and Sunday at the office just trying to get caught up? So one day I emailed the CEO of this almost billion dollars insurance company in my hometown. I just asked him, I said, who manages your mail? Because I was spending five, six hours on a Sunday trying to process all my mail.
And he replied, well, my assistant does. And I kind of laughed at myself.
It's like, why am I doing this? That was the day I decided to hire somebody part-time to process my mail. The reality is, that's something that's been sold for a long time.
It's called meal prep. I know in our town, there's four or five companies that do it.
If you're willing to outsource that, I'm talking no more groceries, no more prep time, no more cleanup. Just have somebody else cook you food that's actually designed to make you stronger, better, smarter.
You don't have the decision fatigue. That's a simple example of delegating high value activities that somebody else can take care of that you don't have to think about so you can focus on the thing only you can do.
See, successful CEOs buy back their time to focus on higher value activities, but you don't have to be rich to start buying back your time. And that's why I created this thing called the delegation ladder.
I'm going to break it down for you. Number one is automate your workflow.
I want you to look at all the work you do in the processing and ask yourself what tool, maybe AI and some automation could you install into your life where it would take care of 60, 70% of the initial research or doing of the work. And then you can come in and finish it off.
But most people don't even think about simple things like hotkeys when they're using some software that they're in all day long to increase their productivity. Number two is outsource your errands.
I'm talking grocery delivery, meal prep, getting the mail. You might be able to convince a friend to go shop for you, and maybe every other week you guys kind of share that process.
There's ways for you to get your time back that doesn't cost anything. It just requires you to be creative with your peer group and your friends.
And maybe you have a young cousin that wants some extra money and you could ask them to go buy stuff for you and just make them a list every two weeks. Number three is delegate your chores.
Think about somebody to help clean your house, clean your car, laundry service, wash and fold. It's a small investment to get a huge chunk of time back.
Number four is offshore your work. Think about there's parts of the world where you can pay them four or five, $6 an hour, and they would be pumped to get this work.
The stuff you do, the admin level, the research, the booking your travel, the purchasing stuff, you can give them all that and get a bunch of time back at a low cost. Number five is hire an assistant.
Now this is a more advanced move, but I'm a big fan of having somebody else in my inbox processing in real time and handling all the incoming requests on my time. And then also managing my calendar.
You're getting emails, messages, phone calls to you from people that need things from you. Now you also have projects you need to get done.
So anytime you're doing that kind of stuff, then you're not doing the projects where you want to spend all your time is getting things done that makes you money, not routing and scheduling. So my calendar, my inbox is owned by my assistant.
She's full-time and she's focused. And in many ways, she's a clone.
She can talk to people, make phone calls, schedule things, make decisions on my behalf so that I spend all my time doing things that make me money and that light me up. Now, most people get stuck because they don't have a playbook or they don't know what to get their assistant to do.
So if you want my executive assistant playbook, just follow me on Instagram and message me YouTube EA. I'll send you a direct link to my Google Doc so you can swipe and copy.
Even if you're working nine to five, you can start today climbing the delegation ladder to buy

back your time so that you can focus on building your habits, beliefs, and skills. So that's how

CEOs get more done. If you want to learn the 12 hacks to increase your productivity that costs

nothing, click the link and I'll see you on the other side. Thanks for listening to Martell Method.

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